NC Legislative Redistricting Has Another Federal Hearing

The filing period for North Carolina’s legislative seats begins in just six weeks. But election district boundaries are still up in the air. A federal court hearing in Greensboro this week may shed some light on whether judges consider efforts to redraw 28 districts to pass constitutional muster.

In 2016, this same three-judge panel found these districts to be illegal racial gerrymanders that weakened the influence of black voters. The U.S. Supreme Court backed the judges up on that last June. And then, the redrawing began.

First, by Republican lawmakers who argued their new maps solved the problem because they didn’t use race as an official criterion. But judges still had questions about two Senate and two House districts. They called in an outside expert known as a special master, Stanford University Law Professor Nathaniel Persily, to redraw those more compactly, and tweak several other districts.

The plaintiffs in the case called Persily’s plan "an appropriate and legal remedy." But lawyers for Republican lawmakers don’t like it. They’ve hired their own consultant Douglas Johnson based in California to testify about “the extent to which race predominated over other traditional redistricting criteria” in Persily’s proposal.

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A federal court is going through with plans to hire an outside expert to redraw several North Carolina legislative districts because judges are concerned Republican lawmakers earlier this year did not fix problems involving racial bias found in some boundaries. An order from a three-judge panel Wednesday appointed a Stanford University law professor to redraw two Senate and seven House districts by December 1.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The expert who federal judges asked to redraw some North Carolina House and Senate district lines rejects Republican arguments that he set race-based population targets within new boundaries, saying he focused on other redistricting criteria instead.